They Voted to Replace Me at My Own Wedding novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Christmas Table

June takes the chair beside Marcello at the dinner for eighty and makes her bridesmaids answer in public. Roxanne asks Marcello who drove Eli to the warehouse, and he says nothing.

On Christmas afternoon I put the wedding dress back on.

It was the only formal thing I had, and I wanted every person at that table to have to look at it.

Marcello watched me zip it up as far as I could reach.

He stood behind me and finished the zipper without a word.

His knuckles stayed at the small of my back one second longer than the zipper needed.

"Dinner's at five," he said. "Seventy-eight guests, stranded. My mother insists on the old ritual."

"Will they be there?"

"All of them."

I knew whom he meant.

The dining hall had a ceiling of black beams and a table the length of a bowling lane.

Candles ran down the middle. Snow beat softly against the tall windows.

Armed men stood at the four corners of the room in dark suits, the way they had stood outside the chapel.

I walked in with my head up and every voice in the room dropped.

Place cards sat in front of every chair, written in my future mother-in-law's perfect hand.

At Marcello's right hand, where the bride sits, the card said Gwen Kinsella.

I picked it up, turned it over, and set it face down by the salt.

Then I pulled out the chair and sat.

Marcello sat down beside me and said nothing. A muscle moved in his jaw.

At the far end, Gwen sat with her father, a tall gray man in a gray suit with a quiet, pleasant face.

He lifted his glass to me and smiled.

I did not lift mine.

My four bridesmaids sat halfway down the table.

Roxanne wore a dark green dress, and her hair was in the soft braid she wears on days off.

Marcy sat apart from them, at the very end, with her hands in her lap.

I stood up before the soup came.

"I want to say something to the women who stood up with me yesterday."

Nobody breathed.

"You first."

I looked at the friend from my floor, the one whose mother I had nursed through chemo.

"I held your mother's hand the night she asked me not to let her die alone," I said.

"I kept that promise. I sat there until six in the morning."

Her face crumpled.

"Why did you vote?"

"Roxanne said he was dangerous."

She was crying already.

"She said you didn't know what he was, and he'd get us all hurt. She said the vote was the only way to get you out safely."

"You thought a poll would save me."

She put her napkin over her face.

I turned to the second one, the friend I had lent six thousand four hundred dollars in March.

"You paid me back last week," I said. "All of it, in cash, two weeks after you told me you were broke."

She went very still.

"Who gave you the envelope?"

Her eyes went down the table, past my head, to the man in the gray suit.

"He said it was a bonus," she whispered. "From a patient's family. I didn't know it was about this."

"You knew by Christmas Eve."

She didn't answer.

The third friend, the one whose shifts I had covered for three Christmases in a row, spoke before I could ask.

"He offered me a job," she said, very fast. "At his private clinic. Double what I make. Roxanne said it was just a game."

Gwen's father set his glass down without a sound.

Every guard in the room was looking at him now.

Marcello's men did not move, but the air in the room changed, as it does before a storm breaks.

"Gwen's father has been very generous to my friends," I said. "I'd like him to say so."

"My dear," said Gwen's father, "I don't recall any of this."

"You can recall it for the sheriff in three days."

He smiled again, and I understood that he was not afraid of me at all.

Marcello stood up beside me.

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

"Let me be clear for the table," he said.

"June sleeps in my bed. She wakes in it. Anyone who lays a hand on her, or a word, answers to me."

Every person in that room heard it.

My face went hot all the way to my collarbones, and I wished I could have been angry about it.

A low sound came from the end of the table, and it was Roxanne clearing her throat.

She was still sitting with her hands folded, calm as a woman at a bedside.

"That's sweet, Marcello," she said. "Does she know about the warehouse?"

I turned my head.

"Roxanne," I said.

"Ask him, June." Her voice was kind. It was always kind. "Ask him who drove Eli there that night."

I looked at Marcello.

The candlelight lay on the side of his face, and the black line of script on his neck moved when he swallowed.

He did not say no.

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